From the time Flavia initiated her Trial, she returned barely two minutes later. When Rakna asked what her simulation had been, she said that she had been dropped in a small town where she had helped the residents to defend against a stampede of monsters.

Soon after, the rest of the group arrived, with Evelyn and Nyx being the first ones. Their simulation had respectively been a rescue mission and a subjugation mission, not unlike Rakna’s. When they were finished, it was Allan and Marie’s turn and both of them got a similar type; plain and simple protection. They were tasked to act as bodyguards for someone.

When they were all done, they stood in front of the pillar as Rakna formed the party through the System. The only way to travel between Plateaus without being separated was to be in a party and they all would need to be heading to a Plateau that they hadn’t yet visited.

“This all reminds of those damn ‘if’s and ‘else’s,” Rakna grumbled as he sent the invites.

“What?” Marie was a bit confused.

“He’s talking about programming. We learned coding in high school,” Allan explained. “And I have to agree. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were class instances for us with detailed coordinates of our travels in the Plateaus. If I were to guess, I’d say that we can’t change Plateaus in a group when one of us already got there in the past is because they have coordinates that cannot be changed through that method.”

Everyone looked at him with genuinely surprised faces.

“Why are you all staring at me like that?”

“You’re usually not that smart-sounding…” Flavia said unhesitatingly.

“Oh, come on! You know better than anyone here that I was always first in exams. Even more, I was the best when it comes to programming,” he stated with some amount of pride.

“Really?” Evelyn tilted her head.

“…what is this feeling of distrust I’m getting?” The blond muttered to himself more than anything.

“Well, you can believe him,” Rakna said blankly. “He isn’t bright but his propensity for all that is studying and technology cannot be underestimated.”

Allan figuratively cried at the sky. “Bro, why’d you say that first part…” He grumbled and everyone chuckled at his distress.

“Anyway,” Rakna continued and opened the window to select Plateaus. “Let’s get going. All of us here should have the required strength to go straight to the 15th. Since we are all at least level 45.”

“True that.”

❮ ◈ ❯

The selection has been confirmed.

Scanning… skipping rights have been met.

The Host, Rakna Xiorra, and his party will now be transferred to the Fifteenth Plateau, The Dark Woods. You will be automatically dropped at a random location in thirty seconds.

Brace yourself for the spatial transfer.

❮ ◈ ❯

“Dark Woods, huh? Creepy.”

‘Higure?’ Rakna asked internally and the lioness hummed.

“{Nope. Never been there. I visited several Plateaus in my lifetime but this isn’t one of them.}”

“{I could help with that,}” Fray said perkily. “{This Plateau is as it sounds; it’s a vast, dark, and treacherous forest. I would like to save the surprise but a small piece of advice for you; do not lower your guard after the transfer.}”

‘How promising,’ Rakna replied sarcastically and when the countdown came to an end, their group was swallowed by a burst of light.

* * *

Meanwhile, in a room filled with all sorts of plushies and decorations, Eva was sitting on top of a queen-sized pink bed whilst furiously typing on a virtual keyboard.

“AAAHH! I hate this!” She yelled childishly and fell back on the bed whilst kicking air. She hugged one of her many pillows and whined. “Too many bugs to fix,” she grumbled to herself.

Since meeting with the source of her headache, namely Rakna, she had been spending all her time making sure that what she had done to turn the lamia into a Host didn’t become a problem.

“And it’s getting harder than expected…” She added and sat up. “Changing her nature was easy but the real hassle is to deal with the aftermath,” she muttered and started typing with one hand until something suddenly blinked in her eyes.

She pouted but her eyes glowed menacingly in contrast. “What do you want?” She asked the figure that had silently appeared behind her. Without even looking back, she continued to work as she waited for an answer.

“Don’t use that tone with me,” the figure spoke. “Answer; why did you reroute the database so that you could do something as senseless as granting the demands of a fresh Host?”

Eva clicked her tongue. “Because he’s worth the investment,” she uttered.

“I don’t believe it. Even if he is the relative of that man, letting him grow within our care is already enough. Furthermore, that Quest you gave him; there are plenty more capable of dealing with it. Some of them could easily trounce the Zero in a day.”

“As if they’d listen to me,” Eva retorted annoyed. “And you know some of them are involved in it as well! And I don’t even know which! What if the one I approached is actually a user of the Arena himself, huh? They are already expecting me to take care of them, I really don’t need to give them a reason to be even more on guard right now, okay?!”

“…” The figure fell silent for a moment as the little girl panted after shouting. “Don’t make a mistake like this again in the future. This is my last warning to you. I will reset you if you continue to show this kind of behavior,” it said before vanishing.

“Coward; too scared of the Kind Demon finding out about the System,” Eva scoffed. She stopped typing and lied down on her bed. She only did it for show anyway.

Using contraptions such as screens and keyboards helped her to relax and it reduced the chances of conflicts between her programming and her humanity. There was a reason she had built herself the persona of a little girl. So that she could have something to fight back her hard-coded duty.

Truthfully, there were billions of processes running in her head at all times and even for an AI of her caliber, that was enough to make her lose herself in practicality and get rid of her ego to better perform her responsibility.

“As if I’d do something to please those shitheads,” she said and started giggling sinisterly. “Let’s see if they’re still going to stay calm when Eternal Night discovers them. For that to happen, I need to trounce the system and make it unstable enough for Him to detect it. And Rakna Xiorra… you are the key,” she whispered with a grin.

“Mwahahaha-BEEP!” She laughed crazily before freezing when she heard an error go off. She eyed the red box flashing dangerously in her mind and her lips twitched.

“There’s an index out of bounds exception in the grass count of the 935th Plateau!?” She yelled with a fuming temper. “How does that even happen from modifying the data of a Dungeon Boss in the Tenth?! AAAHH! I hate you, Big Brother!”

* * *

“Achoo!” Rakna suddenly sneezed as he and his party inspected the thick and gloomy forest that they had landed in. The trees were massive and each of them was at least a meter thick and roughly twenty meters tall. The sky wasn’t even discernable. All of it was leaves that rained down from time to time.

“Again?” The therian muttered confusedly as he rubbed his nose.

“You’re alright?” Allan asked. “You shouldn’t even be able to get sick with the nanobots… Do you think someone is talking about you?” He asked oddly seriously. “Like, they’re preparing a voodoo ritual to kill you or something?

“…why do you make it sound so ominous?” Rakna replied. “It’s probably some unwanted sister of mine getting angry at me for something that isn’t my fault,” he deadpanned and the whole group sent him weird looks.

“That’s oddly specific… and since when do you have an unwanted sister?”

“Since yesterday,” he answered without missing a beat. “But more importantly, I think we should focus on the situation at hand,” he said and turned Sonata into a greatsword. He shouldered it and glanced at the trees surrounding them.

“Yeah, well, they’re kinda obvious,” Allan said as he put on and tightened his gloves.

“And here I wanted to enjoy the sight of nature a bit more,” Marie moped as a large snake suddenly emerged from underground and coiled around her before hissing.

“Hm, I like this environment…” Nyx said with a faint smile. “It’s my home field,” she said as her figure blended with the shadows until even Rakna had a hard time tracking her presence.

“They don’t seem to be willing to attack first,” Flavia mused. “What do we do?”

“Forest fire?” Evelyn tilted her head inquisitively and Tyran chirped, showing that he agreed.

“Please go easy on the pyromania,” Rakna deadpanned. “The fire will not only hurt us but suffocate us as well. For now, let’s just… give them a scare,” he said darkly and a cloak of black energy with a red outline surged around him. It grew bigger and bigger, then a chilly blue mixed with it.

The party shivered and the sounds of birds flying away and other ground animals were heard. At the same time, the ground trembled, and all around them, several of the dark wood trees abruptly shook and deracinated themselves.

The earth was upturned by their roots and their bark splintered and shed off the trunks until an eerie face was formed, stiffly moving its mouth and eyes. They started moving around and the ‘sky of leaves’ above started rustling loudly. The monstrous trees seemed to be targeting the group but didn’t dare to approach them.

“Treants,” Nyx commented from within the shadows. “They look scared,” she added with a small amount of amusement in her voice.

“No kidding,” Allan snickered as he watched Rakna power down his Despair and Cold Aura. When the oppressing feeling was gone, the treants let out otherworldly roars. They started charging at the party with a clumsy gait.

Their roots would constantly plant themselves in the ground then come out to pull the main body. It was an inefficient way of moving but the sheer size of these creatures made it impossible to criticize.

“…now that I look at them, they’re kinda big,” Allan said in a cold sweat. “I like the forest fire idea.”

“[Swords of Liberation,]” Rakna’s voice echoed and three glinting cold energy swords were shot at the same number of treants. They pierced them in the faces and a blue color spread through the gaps of their bark and paralyzed them.

“If you have time to complain, you have time to fight,” the therian said to the blond and blurred out of view to reappear in front of a treant with his sword vibrating and whistling. The azure and red blade tore through the wood of the creature like butter and killed it on the spot.

At the same time, the swords stabbed into the treants exploded and took away with them a large chunk of wood. When Rakna was done with his preemptive assault, four of the treants had already fallen to the ground, each split into two parts.

“[Aeterna,]” Nyx’s voice followed up and an arc of dark lightning emerged from the shadows and slashed through three other treants. ‘Still nowhere close to Him,’ the goddess thought to herself as she saw the power of the spell she had just conjured.

“Damn, those two don’t waste time,” Allan laughed wryly but still rushed to the direction that neither Rakna nor Nyx had yet engaged. His sclera darkened and his void magic covered his body as he approached a treant.

“Marie gave me an idea… let’s see how you like it,” he grinned and narrowly dodged a whip-like attack from one of the creature’s roots. He used it as a stepstone and jumped toward the face of the living tree. He positioned himself for a kick and when he lashed it out, his leg became unseeable for a moment and a perfect trench was suddenly dug on the treant’s trunk.

Allan pulled his leg back with a smirk then punched the tree with all his strength. The place of the impact opened large splinters and the section that he had carved out with his kick gave out under the force. The treant was ripped into two and fell backward.

When he landed back on the ground, Marie blinked at him as her snakes entangled around a few treants. “I gave you that idea?”

“Yep. You petrify whenever you touch someone. As for me? I void them,” Allan said with a wide smile. “In other words, I erase them. Probably doesn’t work on people near my level though.”

“Wow… It’s a good thing you didn’t get that idea while fighting me.”

He laughed and pointed his thumb at Flavia who was making float several treants with gravity before calmly altering their form with wood magic and chipping them with wind magic. Next to her, the Hell Blaze of Evelyn was turning everything to ashes.

“I’m still far from the sheer ferocity of that. Or that…” Allan trailed off and pointed at Tyran who munched one of the trees and breathed fire at the same time. Then Pronos, who had used parasitic poison to infect a treant until its bark was green.

“But you can take hits way better than them,” Rakna said as he appeared next to them with a burst of Flash Step. “To each their own.”

“What? Trying to cheer me up?” Allan snickered. “Doesn’t sound like you.”

“Not really. I’m just saying you might have to use that soon,” Rakna said and transformed into a werewolf at a size where he could still wield Sonata properly. “{Gather up,}” he told everyone with telepathy and they regrouped after finishing off their opponents.

“Is something wrong?” Evelyn asked. “They’re pretty weak. Why did you transform?”

“Smell,” the werewolf said as he pointed at his nose. “Something’s coming. Look,” he gestured at the treants that were now getting away from them. “I don’t smell renunciation from them. Rather, it’s something closer to apprehension and unwillingness.”

“Huh? I’m not following, Rak.”

“What I mean is…” Rakna squinted his eyes as the party started hearing a rumble. Their eyes began to widen in shock as a large shadow pushed through the forest, closer to them. It was larger than the treants by a large margin. “The food chain is at work.”

“{I can’t believe this,}” Higure shook her head. “{You’ve just arrived in this Plateau and yet, you encounter one of those already. I don’t even know what to say.}” To complement her words, a system window popped up in front of everyone.

❮ ◈ ❯

Warning! A Wild Boss has appeared! The Boss is glaring at you.

The conflict has been confirmed. Combat initiated.

Objective: Defeat the Treant King.

❮ ◈ ❯